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Retail-Employer Branding/Recruitment

Situation
Footstar is one of the largest footwear retailers in the United States competing in the discount/family footwear sector. Their affiliates Just For Feet/Footaction stores wanted to recruit high school and college students, but our market research showed that this group viewed the client simply as a shoe store—not a place where they could start an exciting career. This young population felt unqualified to enter the job market—that they had little work experience to contribute to a business environment.

Strategy
Jordan Anderson Advertising developed a multi-media campaign to recruit retail employees, ages 16-24+, for Footstar and its affiliates. We combined dynamic photography and design with humorous, hip copy to grab a young candidate’s attention and cut through the clutter of other classified ads. The campaign was also designed to create a favorable, approachable impression of Footstar and its affiliates in the candidate’s mind. Our market research showed that people are more likely to apply for a job (as well as experience greater job satisfaction) when they feel uniquely qualified for it. Therefore, we developed the campaign around the principle that people who love shoes are uniquely qualified to work at Footstar—and that Footstar wanted prospective employees who loved shoes. The selected photography was chosen to highlight the candidate wearing the product, rather than just the product itself—another way to show the candidate that he/she is reflected in Footstar’s corporate culture.

We included a “free shoes” incentive in the ads to drive traffic to the Footstar website. By inputting their personal statistics to register for the prize, respondents would create an excellent potential candidate pool. We also held Open Houses in the stores and in keeping with the theme we hired a Reflexologist who gave top caliber job candidates a foot massage. On-campus interview days were held targeting December and June graduates at surrounding colleges and were promoted in the college newspaper, media boards throughout the universities and college websites.

Results
Students loved the ads and flocked to the recruiting events in droves. Footstar also capitalized on the flow of traffic to their Web site with our free shoes incentive. Thus, hiring managers had thousands of more resumes in their database providing enhanced value to the company’s hiring needs.